Archive for the ‘leadership tips’ Category

The Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake #7: Casting Your Pearls before Swine

Just so you know, I’m not calling your prospects swine. I’m just saying that most small business people spend way too much time with people who they think are prospects but who have absolutely no chance of ever buying something from them. In order to be a good prospect for you, the person needs to have the resources to buy from you and the authority to buy from you. Don’t spend a lot of time and effort building a reputation amongst people who aren’t in and will never be in your target market. Find where your market gathers and build your reputation there.

The Entrepreneur Boot Camp helps small business owners discover their ideal markets so that every moment of promotion actually leads to more sales and a larger customer base. The Boot Camp uses techniques and information from Doug Staneart’s book, Cultivating Customers.

Doug Staneart is the CEO of The Leader’s Institute® and creator of the Entrepreneur Boot Camp Small Business Workshop. He is based in Dallas, Texas, but the class is taught in cities all over the world.

The Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake #6: Salesperson Fangs

This mistake is the absolute most annoying and will drive customers away in droves. It occurs when someone out of genuine interest or in some cases, just kindness asks a question about what the salesperson does for a living, and in response, the salesperson spends the next fifteen minutes talking about himself and how the listener really needs his product or service. Instead, be genuinely interested in the person that you are talking to. Look for ways to help that get what he or she wants and focus less on what you want. Zig Ziglar once said, “If you help enough other people become successful, you can’t help but become successful yourself.” Successful people tend to be pretty good listeners.

The Entrepreneur Boot Camp helps small business owners alter their product line to better fit the market, or even better, target a more specific market in order to decrease advertising costs and increase results. The Boot Camp uses techniques and information from Doug Staneart’s book, Cultivating Customers.

Doug Staneart is the CEO of The Leader’s Institute® and creator of the Entrepreneur Boot Camp Small Business Workshop. He is based in Dallas, Texas, but the class is taught in cities all over the world.

The Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake #5: Offering Something that the Market Doesn’t Want

You might have a great product or service that people actually want to buy, but if you are promoting that product or service to a marketplace that doesn’t want it, you’ll go broke. If you are networking with other entrepreneurs and your services are for prime contractors, you’ll just become very frustrated. Go find where people in your target market gather, and promote your company there instead. The Entrepreneur Boot Camp helps small business owners alter their product line to better fit the market, or even better, target a more specific market in order to decrease advertising costs and increase results. The Boot Camp uses techniques and information from Doug Staneart’s book, Cultivating Customers.

The Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake #4: I Can Do It on My Own Mentality

We become entrepreneurs because we are experts in a specific industry, and we know that we can do it better than our competitors. However, we are never going to be experts in EVERYTHING, so it’s important to surround yourself with other experts in different industries. You can either contract work out through subcontracting or joint ventures, or you can create alliances with other companies who support you but don’t compete with you. The Entrepreneur Boot Camp helps small business owners network with and create alliances with up-and-coming entrepreneurs to create alliances that help each business owner grow faster. The Boot Camp uses techniques and information from Doug Staneart’s book, Cultivating Customers.

The Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake #3: Creating a Confusing Perception in the Marketplace

This mistake, made early in a business’ history, can follow you for years. When we first start out, we’re trying to find any way that we can to generate revenue, so when times are tough in one product or service line, we dabble in others to make ends meet. People who see you promoting dissimilar product lines will wonder what exactly it is that you do. If you want to attract tons of new customers, you have to get the marketplace to see that you are an expert at SOMETHING. Find your niche, and promote yourself and your company as the expert in that niche. The Entrepreneur Boot Camp helps small business owners focus their marketing efforts on finding and promoting a niche in their industry. The Boot Camp uses techniques and information from Doug Staneart’s book, Cultivating Customers.

If you are a small business owner, regardless of what industry that you are in or what expertise that you have, you first have to realize that you are the expert at something, and the knowledge that you have is valuable to someone. When I was 14 years old, my dad owned a home remodeling company, and every winter, I crawled under houses helping him repair frozen pipes that had burst. After a couple of winters, I had so much experience doing this, that I could do it in my sleep. So as a teenager, I was an expert at repairing ruptured PVC pipes. After I graduated college, my first real job was working for an oil company doing title work for mineral rights. After a couple of years, I had not only gotten pretty good at it, but I had also trained a number of new people. My third year in the training industry, I generated a half-million dollars worth of sales for the first time, and that same year, I also received a couple of awards for outstanding instruction. It took me five years as an entrepreneur to attain my first million dollars, but it only took about eight more months to generate my second million. With each of these accomplishments, I became the expert, because I had information that the general public didn’t have (even when my expertise was repairing frozen pipes).

Don’t under estimate your knowledge. Your experience has made you the expert.

One of my friends in college was going to school to be an elementary school teacher, and she absolutely hated math. However, once she graduated, she found out that in the State of Texas, Math and Science teaches got paid an extra fee, because teachers with this expertise were in high demand. So, she decided to be a fourth grade math teacher. Those of us who knew her pretty well were laughing when we asked her about her career choice, because for the three or four years that we had known her, she complained over and over about the math, algebra, and trigonometry classes that she had to take in school. These classes were her nemesis. After a little teasing from us, she replied by saying, “In order to teach fourth grade math, I just have to be an expert at fifth grade math,” and one of those prophetic life lessons for me was learned. In order to be an expert at something, you just need to have a little more knowledge than your audience.

For instance, let’s say that you are a restaurant manager who turned around a struggling location. How many other managers are there in the world who would want to hear how you did it? You’d be the expert at restaurant turnarounds (especially if you were able to do it a second or third time). Or, if you are a dentist who is really good at getting your patients to show up for every sixth month check-up, then other dentists would pay dearly to figure out how you do it. Whatever you do on a day-to-day basis makes you the expert at that activity.

Because you are the expert, you have credibility in the marketplace.

I had been teaching presentation skills classes for about ten years, and I ended up getting a contract to teach presentation skills and leadership for members of the Associated General Contractors. After teaching classes for these member companies for a couple of years, the participants began to think of me as being an expert in the commercial construction industry. Keep in mind that I had never once built a big skyscraper. In fact, I knew very little about the day to day operations of general contractors. However, because I had worked with so many general contractors in that first couple of years, I had more expertise in the industry than other leadership and presentation coaches. I had developed a specialty.

A friend of mine decided that every sales trainer targets car dealerships as potential customers, so instead, he decided to specialize in conducting sales training for salespeople who sell trailer houses. Since he had very little competition in this industry, he quickly became the go-to expert.

One of my clients hired me to coach a few of his employees who were preparing for what he called a “short list” presentation, which was a presentation where a “short list” of qualified vendors were competing for a really big contract. Although everyone in the room knew more about building skyscrapers than I did, I knew way more about designing and delivering presentations than any of them did. So, with my coaching, they were able to borrow my expertise to deliver their presentation in a much more fluid and effective way.

After doing this kind of training a few times with some pretty remarkable success, I quickly became known as the “short list” presentation coach, and I had developed a brand new expertise.

Ask yourself, “What am I really, really good at?” and you will quickly find out what your expertise is. Once you realize that you are the expert, the rest is relatively easy…

The Entrepreneur Boot Camp helps small business owners speak with confidence and be perceived as being the Expert in their Industry. The Boot Camp uses techniques and information from Doug Staneart’s book, Mastering Presentations.

Doug Staneart is the CEO of The Leader’s Institute® and creator of the Entrepreneur Boot Camp and The Fearless Presentations® public speaking course. He is based in Dallas, Texas, but the class is taught in cities all over the world.

The Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake #2: “I’m a Really Small Company” Website

Just like when a person hands you a business card with the rough edges from separating it at the perforation after it was printed at home, a cheap looking or homemade looking websites is a neon sign saying, “I’M A SMALL BUSINESS… Don’t trust me.” Get rid of your “I’m a Small Business Website.” The Entrepreneur Boot Camp can help any small business owner update their web presence so that potential customers see their small business as a big business. The Boot Camp uses techniques and information from Doug Staneart’s book, Cultivating Customers.

The Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake #1: Hiding Your Company from the World

The internet is the great equalizer for small businesses, but you have to make it easy for people who are looking for your products or services to find you on the internet. Search engine optimization (making it easier for people to find your website through search engines like Google) should be your top priority as a small business owner. The Entrepreneur Boot Camp can help any small business owner optimize their websites to make it easy for customers to find their business. The Boot Camp uses techniques and information from Doug Staneart’s book, Cultivating Customers: Small Business Lead Generation in a Digital Age.

After the initial “start up struggles” when I first created my company, I began to start to get phone calls and emails out of the blue from people wanting to come and work for my trendy, up and coming company. One was from a pretty successful entrepreneur in Orlando, Rick Highsmith, who had already created and sold two companies. When he first called me and told me of some of his accomplishments, I paused and said, “And why is it again that you want to come work for me?” because he had already done what I was trying to do. I figured that I should probably be working for him.

After a few phone calls, Rick decided to invest in a flight to Los Angeles where my next class was taking place, and after the first few hours of the class, he was hooked. He and I had lunch at the hotel, and he told me how impressed that he was with the class. He said that he had “audited” about ten different training companies and had actually gotten certified to teach a few classes, but he wanted to be a part of The Leader’s Institute® because what we were doing was so unique.

I smiled at him and said, “That’s funny, because I decided to hire you the moment you bought your plane ticket to Los Angeles.” No one had ever taken a risk like that on me, so I was very impressed.

Then I looked him right in the eye and said, “Great, that makes two of us now…” and his jaw dropped into his plate. He couldn’t believe that I was running this huge, international company all by myself.

The truth was that, at that time, my company wasn’t a huge international company. In fact, the previous year, the entire revenue of the company was only about $130,000 and the profit was a lot (lot, lot) less.

But I had already begun to figure a few things out about being a small business owner. The main thing was that when everyone else was paying fees to become a “Certified Small Business,” I was beginning to create the impression in the marketplace that my company was a BIG business.

Like most entrepreneurs, I made a bunch of mistakes in the beginning, but every time that I made one of these mistakes, I learned something. Once I learned some of these secrets, I began to pass them along to other business owners so they didn’t have to make the same mistakes.

Folks say that “Experience is the best teacher,” but that is really only about half right. In fact, “Someone ELSE’S experience is the best teacher,” because they have already made those mistakes. Learn from them, and you get to a higher level of success in a much faster time frame.

Team Building Quotes: Below is a list of Japanese proverbs related to Team Building and People Skills. Some are funny. Some are wise. All will make you think a little…

• One kind word can warm three winter months.
• The reverse side also has a reverse side.
• When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
• A good sword is the one left in its scabbard.
• A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle.
• Adversity is the foundation of virtue.
• If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.
• Laughter cannot bring back what anger has driven away.
• One who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger.
• The inarticulate speak longest.
• The tongue is but three inches long, yet it can kill a man six feet high.
• The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention.
• Vision with action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.
• We learn little from victory, much from defeat.
• We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
• We’ve arrived, and to prove it we’re here.